Down, Down Go the Birth Rates for Latter-day Saints

The first decline in the chart, 2008, corresponds to the 2008 recession.

Just curious, what does the 2015 decline correspond to? I’m drawing a blank.

Obergefell v. Hodges

TGW: My gut tells me you’re correct. But I don’t yet see the mechanism or reasoning process. (Like how the 2008 recession would cause a re-think of having children due to economics.)

Could you elaborate please? (“Freakonomics” style reasoning is valid, IMO.)

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Back then, one of my frequent rejoinders in the online debates was “SSM may not affect you, but it will affect your children”, was right in more ways than I realized. And now, in hindsight, it did affect adults …. of child-bearing age.

The big drops correspond to election years. With each passing presidential election people have lost more hope in there being a poaitive future for any potential offspring.

I initially suspected (and have turned out to be right) that TFR dropping that much in that short of a time had to do with immigration. The population of Utah was 2.2 million in 2000 and is 3.3 million today. Idaho went from 1.3 million to 1.8 million in the same timeframe.

I am not saying all is well in Zion, but how much of that drop is attributed to childless, non-member women moving to Utah and Idaho? Is there a way to ascertain TFR for members of the church without using the populations of Utah an Idaho as proxies?

The subtle yet quick reimaging of the marriage relationship in the mind of the youth is one of my strongest seductions

Along the lines of the Archduke’s thinking, if the fertility rate is calculated based on the number of Utah births and the total Utah population, then empty nester retirees (LDS or otherwise) moving to Utah (similarly for Idaho) have lowered the quoted rate even if they previously had a number of children elsewhere.

I don’t know if that is the true explanation or not, just thinking off the top of my head.

Family size has been getting smaller for Latter-day Saints and the general populace, so I don’t doubt the trend, just the specific numbers.

Supporting the migration theory and the 2015-16 dip, from https://www.ksl.com/article/50142547/where-are-all-the-new-utah-move-ins-coming-from-heres-a-breakdown

“In 2020, the University of Utah’s Kem C. Gardner Policy Institute found the state as a whole saw a near-record high of 25,256 out-of-state move-ins.

Migration into Utah didn’t really kick off until 2015 when the numbers jumped from 4,919 to 21,671 in a single year, according to the Kem C. Gardner Policy Institute report.”

“People moving into Utah have come from every state in the nation, perhaps most notably California. About 17,500 Californians moved to Utah between 2014 and 2018 (the most recent years with complete data).”

TIL from Wikipedia

“The TFR is not based on the fertility of any real group of women since this would involve waiting until they had completed childbearing. Nor is it based on counting up the total number of children actually born over their lifetime. Instead, the TFR is based on the age-specific fertility rates of women in their “child-bearing years”, which in conventional international statistical usage is ages 15–44 or 15–49.

The TFR is, therefore, a measure of the fertility of an imaginary woman who passes through her reproductive life subject to all the age-specific fertility rates for ages 15–49 that were recorded for a given population in a given year. The TFR represents the average number of children a woman would potentially have, were she to fast-forward through all her childbearing years in a single year, under all the age-specific fertility rates for that year. In other words, this rate is the number of children a woman would have if she was subject to prevailing fertility rates at all ages from a single given year and survives throughout all her childbearing years.”

Which makes me wonder how on earth they calculate that.

If I am understanding this correctly, then the (hopefully mostly?) non-lds women with no children are driving the TFR decrease but the many descendant empty nesters do not.

Given those age ranges for tfr, the collapse in the Utah county and especially the BYU Idaho numbers could be as much about the collapse of early marriage and early family formation at BYU and BYU Idaho as it is about overall declines and fertility. Though there is every reason to think that overall declines in fertility are also happening

I think housing prices are a factor.

Another is the increasing number of autistic/ADHD/OCD young adults; social relations like courtship don’t come easy for them.

There are a lot of specific stats that are both explicit in, and those that can be “teased out of”, the accumulated history of membership records.

“Raise the bar” of 2002. The Preach My Gospel teaching system. Elder Oaks’ “dating verus hanging out” talk of 2005. The revamp of youth curriculum in (circa) 2008. Missionary age change of 2012. Revamp of youth programs in late 2019, early 2020. All these were in whole or in part due to trends in demographics, birth rates, activity rates, youth retention, annual number of converts, etc.

Elder Oaks’ “dating versus hanging out” talk of 2005 was obviously in response to what could be clearly seen in trends in basic membership stats: age of marriage of those who grew up in the church, and their avg # of children.”

But, the above chart shows a level and steady TFR from 2003 to 2006. So…. either it was even higher sometime before 2003, or, Elder Oaks was looking at member stats across the US, or Elder Oaks foresaw what was going to happen. (Or the chart might just be inaccurate.)

Anecdotally, I was at an activity where the 1st councilor’s wife was talking about how a lot of teens now think it’s a virtue not to date at all even after 16, and even brag about not dating up until their missions. She was lamenting that none of these kids are learning what a healthy dating relationship looks like while young, which leads them into bad decisions later.

I can’t say she’s wrong. I didn’t date because I was introverted *and* shy as a teen – I didn’t go on a single date until I was . . . 21? 22? as a result. But I also don’t think it was all my fault, because the guys aren’t asking.

@ Old Man,
You’re not wrong about the housing prices. 60 years ago, you could get a decent starter home for $25,000-ish. Now? The same home in the same neighborhood is worth $300,000 or more.
You’re also right about autism/OCD; I actually just went on a first date with an autistic kid who thought it was a good idea to bring his kid sister along. I spent the entire hike wondering if I was in some alternate universe where this was acceptable courting behavior (though honestly his sister was less awkward than he is, and I admire his courage in trying). I mean, I don’t have much dating experience myself, but that was just downright weird.
Our activities person is thinking about doing a Home Evening on how to date, because there seems to be a crying need for it.

The TFR in North Dakota and South Dakota is higher than that of Utah. This suggests that low population density is a far greater determinant of TFR, than the specific details of the M_rm_n theology (regarding the family). The same correlation is true within other countries and between countries.

E.C.: taking along an interpreter/coach makes sense from an Asperger’s/autism viewpoint. Kid sister can sort of keep him in check, calm, and balanced, something like a companion animal. After they got home, she would have translated what you said and did into language he could understand; and telling him what he said and did right/wrong, and verbalizing all the non-verbal communication you made.

Autism is not just one language. Every autistic is wired differently. When you learn to speak with one autism-spectrum person, it isn’t necessarily the same language/protocol for the next one you meet. Though there are some over-arching principles in common. So learning each new person’s language and “communication protocols” gets easier each time you meet a new one.

This is…kind of just me kicking sand in the arena, but I must confess I’m skeptical the counselor’s wife E.C. mentioned knows what a “healthy dating relationship” is.

A “healthy dating relationship” is like calling a youtube video a TV channel, or calling a negotiation a partnership. A “dating relationship” that is healthy either ends, or turns into marriage. Calling it a “relationship” is borrowed language from the world, who want to establish a veneer of permanency over fornication.

To end on a positive note, this implies much can be improved on in today’s dating and mating habits.

SPDI: Excellent observation. I would give the counselor’s wife the benefit od the doubt and assume that she was using your (the LDS) definition, not the popular/worldly definition.

I’ve seen charts similar to this before; what what I notice each time is that the years with dramatic drops correspond to the years when my own children were born. So my anecdotal evidence clearly doesn’t match the data, but I’m only representing one family.

That said, I don’t know how much economic trends factor into people’s decisions on when to have children. My oldest daughter was born at the same time the stock market took a dive in 2008, and that wasn’t something people were anticipating when she was conceived nine months earlier.

My guess is that people’s decisions about having children are determined much more by whether they want to have children than whether they can afford them. As to why people might not want them, I don’t think there are simple answers tied to current events, so much as complex answers that require us to look a bit further back, even to when people of childbearing years were children themselves.